From London – A Concise History by Geoffrey Trease:

…it was not surprising that the London ladies made an impression upon the poet. Erasmus, visiting England about the same time, commented on the number of 'married women and damsels' who were actively engaged in commerce and industry, and there is plenty of documenrary evidence for it. But it was something else that especially appealed to the Dutch scholar and to many other visiting strangers:

To mention but a single attraction, the English girls are divinely pretty, soft, pleasant, gentle and charming. . . . They have one custom which cannot be too much admired. They kiss you when you arrive. They kiss you when you go away and they kiss you when you return. Go where you will, it is all kisses, and, my dear Faustus, if you had once tasted how soft and fragrant those lips are, you would wish to spend your life here.

Earlier, in 1466, a Bohemian described how 'at the first arrival of guests in any lodging, the hostess with all her household comes forth into the street to receive them; and each one of them it behoves each one to kiss. Indeed to them to take a kiss is, as to others, to offer the right hand; for they are not used to offer the hand.' The custom continued a long time. Nicander Nucius, a Greek visitor to London in 1545, excused this female forwardness : 'To themselves this appears by no means indecent.' They were still at it in the days of Bunyan, who tactlessly inquired why, if the kissing was no more than a polite convention, 'did they salute the most handsome, and let the ill favoured go!'

Despite the Puritans, the casual kissing did not stop until the eighteenth century, when increasing sophistication brought more formal manners.

Cesar de Saussure, visiting London from Lausanne in 1725, still observed that many women were offended if not thus warmly greeted, but that 'some of the ladies who have travelled in foreign countries now offer their cheeks instead of their lips.'

Erasmus would have seen this, sadly, as the beginning of the end.